The Tagmemic Contribution to Composition
Teaching

II. The Development of Kenneth L. Pike's Tagmemic Theory

In 1948, Kenneth L. Pike began the search for a syntactical counterpart
to the phonological and morphological terms, phoneme and morpheme--something
at the sentence level which could function as a key identifying unit in
the same way that these well- established terms functioned. Pike was looking
for a high- level generalization that could characterize all human language
and which would simplify the training of missionaries and Bible translators
who would encounter previously unstudied and thus grammatically uncharted
languages. The result of Pike's search was the tagmeme and the linguistic
system that has come to be known as tagmemics. But what was most interesting
about his search was the fact that what started as merely a "language theory"
soon evolved into a structural theory that attempts to account for all
of man's behavior. Indeed, Pike's seminal work of three volumes is entitled,
Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior.

The impetus for this expansion of the tagmemic theory was an epistemological
question: how is it that we can recognize objects without knowing everything
about them? As Pike explains, "Tagmemic theory staked its claims on the
belief that essential to the description of human behavior as we live it
must be the ability to recognize a friend even though he has just had Wheaties
for breakfast, cut his long hair, and replaced his necktie."11 What is
it about a "unit," i.e., any person, event, situation, object, concept
that allows one to recognize and describe it adequately? Pursuing the implications
of this question further, Pike soon departed from the strictures of the
structural linguistics he had been trained in; he could no longer treat
language as a sui generis, autonomous phenomenon that could be studied
in isolation from other, non- linguistic human behavior.

Pike insists that language must be considered a part of the whole of
human behavior and his belief that a unified theory is needed to
account for the whole is seen in two major contributions of tagmemics to
linguistic thought: (1) the concept of the trimodal structure of behavior
and (2) the distinction between emic and etic descriptions
of behavior.

Pike argues that every unit of behavior to be well described must be
characterized in these three ways: (1) how it differs from everything else
in its class; (2) what its range of variability is, i.e., how much it can
change and still be itself; and (3) what range of contexts can appropriately
contain it, i.e., its distribution among other systems. 12 Theoretically,
any unit of human experience can (and ultimately must) be viewed
through this trimodal structure. Pike then combines this notion of the
trimodal structure of behavior with a model from the physical sciences:
any unit can be viewed as a particle, as a wave or as a field.
The correlation of these two concepts results in a matrix which is useful
in effectively defining and describing any unit of experience. This matrix
forms the heuristic procedure Young, Becker and Pike employ in their textbook,
Rhetoric: Discovery and Change. This will be explored in greater
detail later.

One of Pike's other contributions to linguistic theory is his distinction
between emic and etic viewpoints. Pike coined the terms from
the endings of the words, phonemic and phonetic. The "emic" view is the
perspective of the insider, the native, and is concerned with the contrastive,
patterned system within a universe of discourse; the "etic" view of a unit
is the perspective of the outsider who looks for universals and generalizations.
The "emic" view is the view we expect from a participant within a system;
the "etic" view is the view we expect of the alien observer. John Algeo
has suggested a useful illustration of these kinds of perspectives.

A noncardplayer observing a game of bridge will see different
things than a bridge- player will. The noncardplayer, who is an "alien"
in this situation, may notice that the cards are handled and passed around,
that the players pick up the cards in front of them and carry on a short
conversation in cryptic phrases, that one player then puts all of his cards
on the table while the other three put theirs down one by one as this player
or that pulis little piles of cards in front of him . . . What the bridge-
player sees as a "native" to the game is a distinct unit called a "hand,"
consisting of the deal, the bidding, the play and the scoring. The noncardplayer
observes a number of etic facts, some of which fit into the emic categories
of the bridge- player and some of which are irrelevant . . . To know which
events at the card table are significant for the game, which are not, and
how the significant events are related to one another, one must know the
rules of the game--that is, one must know the events emically. 13

This etic/emic contrast is used by Pike to distinguish between those
elements in an uncharted grammar which are crucial, indispensable factors
(emic) and those which are incidental, insignificant (etic). We will also
have more to say about this aspect of tagmemics below when we examine the
use Young, Becker and Pike have made of this distinction for composition.

Pike's work in tagmemic theory has not, in general, been as widely accepted
by scholars as the work of Noam Chomsky and other transformationalists.
Nevertheless, individual concepts within tagmemics have been adopted and
adapted by a variety of disciplines.l4 Tagmemics can be seen, in a sense,
as being all things to all men, with a remarkably wide range of applications,
especially in but not limited to, linguistics. Austin Hale confesses that
"it is at present quite possible to be a tagmemicist in good standing without
subscribing to any particular doctrine regarding the form of grammar. To
one who received a good portion of his linguistic upbringing within the
tradition of transformational generative grammar, this realization comes
as a shock and a revelation."15 Though popularly categorized as a ''slot-
grammar," Kenneth L. Pike's peculiar insights into the nature of language
and behavior are compatible with and not in opposition to the insights
of other schemes and systems. Two concerns do, however, set the work of
Pike apart from the others: (1) Pike is interested in fashioning a total
system of human behavior--not one that accounts just for language behavior;
and (2) Pike is preeminently humanistic in his orientation, and decidedly
opposed to any mechanistic view of man or his language behavior. These
concerns will be of interest when we later consider attacks that have been
made against the tagmemic conception of the composing process.

In view of its adaptability and intended scope, it is not difficult
to see how there come to be such labels as "tagmemic rhetoric," "tagmemic
discovery procedure," "tagmemic composition theory" and so on. It is not
so much that a "grammar theory" has gotten out of hand and invaded territory
once considered inaccessible and inappropriate for such theories, but that
certain insights discovered in the study of language as language have been
found to be useful and helpful in the teaching of composition. In 1964,
in an article in College Composition and Communication, Pike suggested
a possible contribution to composition teaching by linguistics, tagmemics
in particular. In that ground- breaking article, Pike asked, "Would it
be possible to explore a number of the axioms of such a language theory
[as tagmemics] in order to develop exercises based on these axioms about
language structure, but specifically designed to develop writing competence?"16

Pike's work in training linguists to analyze and write descriptions
of foreign languages enabled him to "develop a body of theory general enough
to apply to any language whatever . . . and at the same time to invent
exercises which would break down the learning problem into small bits in
terms of simulated language . . ."17 Pike and his colleagues attacked the
problem by creating "languagettes" or artificial languages for analysis
and inventing exercises to help students learn the effective use of such
languages. Pike's ploy here is reminiscent of C.C. Fries' work in applying
the insights of structural linguistics to English when he suggests that
exercises formerly designed to teach effective use of foreign languages
can be successfully used in the English composition classroom.

From that salvo in 1964, Pike, with Michigan colleagues Young and Becker,
began to explore the application of the theory to composition teaching.
The theory was initially employed to improve the grammatical competence
of students; though helpful here, the theory's potential in serving rhetorical
concerns soon became the focus of research and experimentation.18 While
the three Michigan professors continued to collaborate throughout the decade,
their work culminating in the text, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change,
the seventies saw Richard E. Young emerge as the major spokesman, theorist
and researcher for "tagmemic composition theory." Starting "merely" as
a language theory, tagmemics has now generated methodologies for helping
native speakers to improve their use of their language, supplied the framework
for "a modern theory of rhetoric" and, more recently, given impetus to
a promising new means of discourse analysis.19 The stage is now set for
the what and how of tagmemic theory: an exploration of the nature and application
of the theory itself.